


Time And Relative Death In Saloons

by dancinbutterfly



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Ghosts, History, Hope, Literature, M/M, Modern Era, Recreational Drug Use, That was the prompt and that's what happened., Time Travel, prompt: unexpected
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-25
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2019-01-05 12:47:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12190278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinbutterfly/pseuds/dancinbutterfly
Summary: Red really just wanted to a little buzzed in the old Imperial Saloon at the edge of town on a night off. He wasn't looking to give counsel any Ghost of Not-Christmas Way-Past while doing it.





	Time And Relative Death In Saloons

**Author's Note:**

> Day 3: Monday, Sept. 25  
> Unexpected || ~~Alternate Universe~~
> 
> I tried to fit the Alternate Universe prompt and ended up filling the Unexpected one instead because I was not expecting this story to turn out the way it did. I hope you like it.

Red isn’t particularly inured to Christmas time. It was a white man’s holiday with white man’s music that gave the white man an excuse to buy a lot of shit they didn’t need and freak out for no good reason. He doesn’t do Christmas. His family sticks to the Commanche festivals and old ways because fuck assimilating with the genocidal colonists, man, seriously.

But he does appreciate that everyone he knows gets long weekends. That he likes.

He doesn’t have a lot of friends, never really has. His grandmother says he has to walk his own path and that’s a better reason for being stoned and alone on a national and cultural holiday. Doesn’t really give him a reason to have snuck into The Imperial Saloon but hey, maybe breaking into a west Nevada historical landmark is part of his different path. 

It's a generous thought but the real reason is Red’s always wanted to catch a buzz in here. Rose Creek’s Imperial Saloon is the oldest standing building in town, going back to the founding in 1864. It's been a bunch of things over the years, usually a bar or a strip club of one sort or another according to his dad, but Red's whole life the Imperial's been a tourist trap replica of an Old West saloon and a legitimate national heritage site. Apparently when a bar’s more than a hundred years old, it stops being about drinking and fucking and starts being about history, which Red thinks is actually kind of cool. 

He’s really not supposed to be smoking in here though, with it being a museum and all. It’s incredibly stupid - considering the place only existed for guys like him, only whiter, to smoke and drink and play cards and hit each other but he’s not so he has the smoke detector batteries in his pocket along with the rest of his bud and a packet of Swisher Sweets, should the mood for another joint take him. 

He moves across the room and slides onto a barstool. It’s not remotely comfortable but with the buzz he’s got going, the novelty is enough to outweigh the inconvenience. He chuckles as he studies the bottles behind the bar, all ancient and faded and totally empty. 

He lifts the joint in his hand dangling from his fingers and gestures at the bar, full of empty bottles from the 1870s. “Well, drink up I guess,” he toasts, chuckling to himself. “Here’s to you, cowboys.”

“And to you,” a voice replies from his left. 

There’s an Asian man in dusty leathers and a linen-looking shirt suddenly seated beside him and Red nearly falls off the stool. 

“Who the fuck are you?” He looks around, eyes wide. “How the fuck did you get here?”

The man lifts his glass, it’s full. “That’s a good question, coming from you.” He snorts, as if that’s hilarious though Red doesn’t know why. He’s too busy being freaked out.

“Hey, man, look-“ 

“I don’t know,” the man sighs heavily, obviously not caring that Red has broken and entered to get this seat in the darkened Imperial. “I feel like I did just this morning.” He knocks back his drink and sets it on the bar with a thud. Red watches as it is refilled in a blink of an eye without anyone touching it. “Fuck.”

“I’m in a Christmas Carol,” Red mumbles. “Jack gave me bad shit and now I’m in a fucking Christmas Carol. So are you like, what, Marley’s ghost?”

The man smiles a little. “No. Scrooge maybe, with the end of my life staring at me and the chains forged in life weighing me down.” The man shakes his head. “Not my favorite Dickens. I like A Tale of Two Cities.” He smiles a little. 

“That’s the one in France?”

“Mmm.”

Yeah, he’d had to read that for 9th grade English. He doesn’t remember much about it except that he hadn’t liked it and it must show on his face.

“What can I say? There’s something about a hero who will sacrifice his life not for your safety, but for your happiness.” He gives a small smile into his glass then downs the whole thing in one go. Red’s never been a drinker for so many reasons, genetics topping the charts, but the sad edge this guy has to him is just reinforcing that decision. “Not a Dickens fan?”

“Not especially.” He knows the adaptations. The cartoon cat version of Oliver Twist was one of his favorites as a kid but, yeah, he’s not big into British literature. He’s more into Sherman Alexie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and he’s got a copy of Who Fears Death on his phone he needs to start because post-apocalyptic magicagical African scifi that’s about to be made into the next Game of Thrones? Sign him the fuck up. 

The man’s face softens a little despite his lack of enthusiasm. “He’s one of Goodnight’s favorites. His favorite changes by the day but ask him when he’s tired or cold and he’ll always come back to The Old Curiosity Shop.” He rubs his forehead with a gloved hand. The gloves are fingerless, like a modern goth kid but thicker, dustier. “He has a weakness for hopeless causes.” 

Red tightens his fist and takes a deep breath. With careful movements, he reaches out and to put a hand on strange man’s shoulder because just looks so fucking sad. The contact lands, solid and firmly but there is something wrong vibrating up his arm. It reminds Red of mornings when he’s overslept for school or work, or when he’s taken a nap and woken up thinking it’s a different day, like time has gone tacky and thick and wrong around him.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your problem,” the man says. “You man your post and we’ll all get through tomorrow. He’ll come back. He always comes back.” He puts his hand on his chest and pulls out a small flask, silver and black with a fleur-de-lis on it. “He’ll surprise himself.” He smiles, warm and fond as his thumb smooths over the fleur-de-lis. “He’s not the hopeless cause he thinks he is. He’s never failed me yet. He just thinks he has.”

“Goodnight.”

The man hums in agreement and sighs. “What do your people think about that?”

Red blinks. “About what?”

“Us,” the man says. “One outsider to another, Red Harvest, what do the Commanche think? Do they care where men find love?”

Red feels like he’s choking, strangling on his own breath. Jack’s shit must have had PCP or GHB or something in it for this strange man in his old times clothes to address him by the name he keeps to himself and know his culture and look him dead in the eyes and ask his thoughts on fucking queer culture.

“I, uh, I don’t know.” He stutters because if this is a trip then it doesn’t matter. If this shit is giving him full on audio-visual-sensory hallucinations then what he says is meaningless but he is Commanche and he was brought up to believe in the very tangible nature of the strength he drew from his ancestors and in things beyond human understanding. He feels like if he turns away from the possibility that this man is real, he could be turning away from himself. “But I think that if you love someone and they love you, that can only be a good thing.”

The man smiles at him, wide and bright and sharp like a shark’s. “You’re so young. I don’t think I was ever that young and never as Billy Rocks.” His lips loosen into something softer, a grin with the sheen of affection over an ocean of sadness. The man, Billy Rocks, reaches out and squeezes Red’s shoulder, more of that strange too-late, too-early, wrong-day feeling seeping into him. “Let’s make sure you get a chance to grow out of that.”

He downs his last glass, magically refilled and slides it across the bar, far off the edge. It slides off the end but there’s no crash of glass. Red is fairly sure that’s because this already happened. 

Billy squeezes his shoulder one last time. “Get some sleep, Red,” he says, barely slurring. “We have a big day ahead of us.”

“Night,” Red replies and watches as Billy slides off the barstool and into the dining room. The closer to the stairs he gets, the less solid he becomes until his feet hit the bottom landing and there is nothing left of him at all. 

Red grinds out what’s left of his joint and does a quick wallet-phone-keys check. He doesn’t know what the fuck just happened here. He isn’t sure he wants to know. It was too much too fast and he needs to process.

But, he did see The Old Curiosity Shop as a TV movie once and he remembers that all the girl Nell had wanted in the end was to go home. He thinks that maybe Dickens was on to something with that because at the moment, that’s all he wants too. The only thing stopping him is the idea that maybe Billy Rocks is a ghost, that he’s leaving him here alone. But, then again, he’d said that Goodnight would come back. 

He left the smoke-detector batteries on the now pristine bar-top and left. It was far easier to walk away with a clear conscience believing that he wasn’t leaving a man alone to haunt that building forever, just to wait a little while. After all, Billy Rocks the Ghost said that Goodnight fellow loved him and had never failed him. If Billy could trust him to come back then Red could content himself to do the same.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes:  
> 1)I am not knowledgable about Commanche religious practices except for the fact that they are, in fact, not Christian (duh) and to my very limited understanding, there seems to be spiritual and ancestral factors to it. I tried to keep all references shallow for these reasons but canon Red Harvest seemed fairly in touch with his spiritual side so I couldn't leave it out. I hope that was all right.  
> 2)The opinions on Charles Dickens works expressed in this fic are solely those the characters who expressed them. They are not in any way representative of the author and the author has not approved, endorsed, or authorized any Dickens discourse in the real world.  
> 3)I wrote this fic and honestly don't know what this is. It can be read as a ghost story, a time travel story, a reincarnation story, all of them, none of them, or any combination thereof. Take it as you will. 
> 
> If you want to make me a really happy panda, please feel free to leave a comment as it is scientifically proven that the shortest comment is equal to 100 kudos. 
> 
> [Please feel free to come scream at me on tumblr. I'm always about and you're always welcome. :D](http://dancinbutterfly.tumblr.com/)


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